Virgin Earth

Spring 1644, Virginia

John did not go back to the Hoberts’ homestead for a month. He hunted with Attone and the other braves, he lived as a Powhatan. But there was a coldness between Suckahanna and him that the routine of ordinary life could not conceal.

When he judged it was time for the planting out of Bertram’s tobacco he spoke to Attone, rather than Suckahanna.

“My friend who was sick needs me to plant out his tobacco. I should go and help him now.”

“Go then, Eagle,” Attone said unhelpfully.

“Suckahanna will be angry at my going.”

“Stay then.”

“I’m not asking for help-”

“I’m not giving any.”

John paused for a moment and bit back his temper. Attone was smiling. He loved to be annoying.

“I’m telling you that I will be away for a while,” John said patiently. “I am asking you to watch Suckahanna for me and fetch me if she is in any need. She will not send for me; she is angry with me. She would not send for me even if she needed me.”

“She will be in no need. The game is coming back, the fish are spawning. What would she need you for? You can go to your smelly friends.”

John gritted his teeth. “If one of the People was in trouble you would go to his help.”

“Hobert is not one of the People. He is not one of mine.”

John hesitated. “Nor is he mine,” he said, conscious of the pain of divided loyalty. “But I cannot see him fail or fall sick or die of hunger. He was good to me once, and I have made him a promise.”

“This is a path in a circle,” Attone said cheerfully. “You are wandering like a man snow blind, ’round and ’round. What is blinding you, Eagle? Why can you not walk straight?”

“Because I am pulled two ways,” John said grimly.

“Then cut one string,” Attone said briskly. “Before it tangles around your feet and brings you down.” He rose to his feet and loped down the river toward the fish weir without looking back.

The Hoberts’ house was amid a sea of green. Bertram had started planting the fields which ran between the house and the river and the absurd flop-leaved plants were three rows thick before the house.

“John, thank God you’ve come!” Hobert said, kneeling. “I was afraid you would fail us.”

“Mr. Tradescant, you are very welcome!” Sarah said from further down the row.

John, hot in his reclaimed breeches and shirt, waved at them both.

“You should have a hat to shield you from the sun,” Sarah scolded. “Men have died of sunstroke in this country.”

John put his hand to his face and felt the heat radiating from his flushed skin. “It’s these clothes,” he said. “How can anyone wear wool in this country in spring?”

“It’s the vapors in the air,” Sarah said firmly. “When we next go to Jamestown I will buy you a hat. We’ve only just come back from town.”

“There was a letter for you,” Bertram said, remembering. “I went into Jamestown to buy a hoe and to collect some money sent me from England. I called in at your inn and there was a letter for you there.”

“For me?” John asked.

“It’s inside. I put it under the mattress you used last time to keep it safe.”

John put his hand to his head.

“There you are! Sunstroke!” Sarah exclaimed triumphantly.

“No,” John said. “I just feel… It is so odd to have a letter…”

He turned and went into the house, jumped up the ladder in one bound. In the loft bedroom was his straw mattress and underneath it was a travel-stained folded and sealed paper. John snatched it up and recognized Hester’s writing at once.

A great pain shot through John at the thought of his family in Lambeth and a great fear that one of the children, Frances, or Johnnie, was sick or dead, or that the house had been lost to passing soldiers or the garden destroyed, or Hester herself… he pulled himself back from nightmare imaginings, broke the seal and smoothed out the paper.

Lambeth, the New Year, 1644

Dear Husband,

Having heard no news from you I pray that your venture is going well and that you have found the land you wanted, cleared it and planted it. It is strange for me not knowing what the view is like from your window, nor what your kitchen is like, nor what the weather may be for you. I try to tell the children about what you are doing now but I do not know whether to tell them you are struggling through deep snow or digging in damp earth. We are reading Captain Smith’s True History in the evenings so that we may understand a little of your life, but I have to keep missing out some of his adventures as the children would be too afraid for you. I pray that you are right and that it is not such a savage place as he describes, and that the planters too have become more kindly and Christian in their doings.

Here in Lambeth we are well but troubled, as is everyone in the kingdom, by the continuance of the war. Food is very scarce and there is no coal to be had at all. There has been petty fighting on the roads into London and we never know whether meat for the markets will be driven in or not. Our men are called up to serve in the City trained bands but they have not yet been sent outside the bounds of the City, so when they are stood down they come back to work. We try to keep the Ark and the gardens open as normal and we are trading a little. There are still people who want to live as if the war were not taking place and they still want to know that gardens are growing and that strange and rare beautiful things can still be seen. It is very pitiful to me when a young gentleman comes to order some seeds or plants or trees before he goes off to join either the king or the Parliament army, and I know that he is planting for his heir and does not expect to see the trees grow. It is at those times that I realize what wickedness this war is and will be, and I confess, I blame the king very much for standing so upon his rights and driving his people into rebellion.

I did not think I would ever be able to say it, but I am glad you are not here, husband. I miss you and so do the children but I do not know how a man could keep his wits and bear the sorrow of this kingdom, especially one like you who had served the king and the queen and seen them reap the consequences of their folly. There are rights, God-given rights, on both sides of the argument and all a woman can wonder is why the two sides cannot come together and resolve to live in peace. But they cannot, they will not, and God help them we all suffer while they hammer out the victory one on the other. Parliament is now in alliance with the Scots and they have sworn to defend each other against the king. But the Scots are a long way away and the king’s armies are very close, and everyone seems to think he has the advantage. Also, he has now recruited a Papist Irish army and we are all most afraid of their coming.

What seems more and more certain to me, when this is all over, is that we shall see the king in London again with his liberties barely trimmed, and those who have stood against him will have to pray God that he is more generous in victory than he was in peace time. Prince Rupert is said to be everywhere, and the other commander of the armies is the queen, so you can imagine how the king is advised between those two. Prince Maurice serves also and they have taken Bristol and Devizes this summer. Against the wealth of the king, the Parliament army makes a pitiful showing. The king has commanders who have fought all over Europe and know how it should be done, Prince Rupert has never lost a battle. Against them the Parliament puts plowboys and apprentice lads into the fields and the gentlemen mow them down like barley. We hear constantly from the Parliament of little battles which are fought at places of no name and mean nothing but are hailed as great victories.

However, the king has not yet approached London – and the City remains firmly against him. Your father-in-law, Mr. Hurte, has provided his own regiment to defend the City, he says – as all the merchants do – that the king cannot rule the City again. But since all the other great towns of the kingdom are falling to the king one by one then clearly, London cannot hold out alone – especially if the queen prevails on her French relations to join her husband. If a French army marches on Westminster the Parliament will have been defeated indeed, and I think it will be harder to be rid of the French Papists than it was to invite them.

Worse than the French Papists will be an Irish army. The great fear is that the king is planning all the time to flood the kingdom with Irishmen, but I cannot believe that such wickedness is in his mind. Not even he, surely, would sow such a whirlwind. If they could ever be prevailed upon to leave, what Englishman would ever trust the king’s word again?

The king holds Oxford of course, and his friends hold garrisons all the way up the Great North Road to Scotland. The queen holds York, and while she is in the field I have no hope of peace. The king’s army must march on London soon, and those of us who know not what to think (and that is most of us) can only hope that the city surrenders quickly.

The children are well, though running wild with neither school nor society to tame them. I will not let them go to the city which is full of the plague again, spread I am sure by the traveling soldiers who come and go from battle to village. I have had a one-way door set in our wall so that we can give food to passing paupers without any one of the servants having to open our front door. The bridge over the stream I have had made into a little drawbridge and we pull it up at night. I have completed the wall around the Ark and garden and sometimes I feel that I am a Mrs. Noah in very truth, peering over the edge of the Ark as the waters of the end of the world arise and swirl around me. It is on such nights that I feel very lonely and very afraid and I wish that I were with you.

Johnnie says that he will be a soldier and fight for the king. He has an etching of Prince Rupert on his black horse pinned to the head of his bed and makes most bloodthirsty prayers for his safety every night. He is a handsome, brave boy, as clever as any child in the kingdom. He is reading and writing in Latin and English and French, and I have set him to making the plant labels in English and Latin which he does without error. He misses you very much but he is proud of having a Virginia planter for a father, he thinks you are daily wrestling with bears and fighting Indians and prays for your safety every night.

Frances is well too. You would hardly recognize her, she has grown in these last few months from a girl to a young woman. She wears her hair pinned up now all the time and her skirts very long and elegant. I always knew she would be beautiful but she has surpassed my hopes for her. She has such a dainty prettiness about her. She is as fair as her mother, Mrs. Hurte tells me, but she has a lightness of spirit which is all her own. Sometimes she is too flighty, I am aware of it, and I try to reprove her, but she is such a merry dear that I cannot be too strict. She manages the garden in your absence and I think you will be proud of her when you return. She has a real way with plants and growing things. I often think it is such a shame that she cannot take your place in very truth and be another Tradescant gardener as she always wished to be.

It is her fate which is my greatest worry if the fighting should come near to London. I think that Johnnie and I could survive anything but a direct attack, but Frances is so pretty that she attracts notice wherever she goes. I dress her as plainly as I can and she always wears a cap on her head and a hood to cover her hair when she goes out, but there is something about her which turns men’s heads. I have seen her walk down the street and people simply look at her as if she were a flower or a statue, something rare and fine which they would like to take home with them. A wealthy man, whom I will not call a gentleman, visited the garden the other day and offered me ten pounds to give her to him. I had Joseph show him off the premises as quickly as you would wish, but it shows you the anxieties which I suffer over her. One of the kitchen maids – a fool – told Frances that the gentleman had taken a fancy to her and made an offer which was not of marriage, and before he had gone I am sorry to say that she climbed up on the garden wall, turned her back on him, and upended her skirts to show him her bum. I pulled her down and spanked her for indecency, and then thought she was crying most pitiably for shame, but when I had her right way up again I saw she could not speak for laughing. I sent her to her room in disgrace, and only when she was gone did I laugh too. She is a great mixture of minx and child and young lady, and I fancy the fine gentleman would have got more than he had bargained for.

If I think there is a chance of the fighting coming any closer I shall send her up the river to Oatlands, but with the country in this turmoil I do not know where she could be most safe. My choice, of course, is to keep her close by me.

My greatest adviser in these difficult times is your father’s friend and your uncle, Alexander Norman, who has the most immediate news of anyone. Since he sends out the ordnance from the Tower of London he always knows where the fiercest fighting has been and how much munition was used in every battle. He comes out to see us every week and brings us news and satisfies himself that we are well. He treats Frances as a complete young lady and Johnnie as the head of the household, and so they always welcome his arrival as their most favorite guest. Frances is never naughty when he is with us but very sober and careful, an excellent little housewife. When I told him of the man who had offered money for her he was more angry than I have ever seen him before and he would have challenged the man to a duel if I had given his name. I told him that the man had been punished enough but I did not tell him how.

And as for myself, husband, I will speak of myself though we were not married for love and have never been more than mere friends and for all I fear you do not think of me kindly since we parted on a disagreement. I am doing my duty according to my promise made to you at the altar and to your father on his deathbed to be a good wife to you, a mother to your children, and to guard the garden and the rarities. The beauty of the rarities, of the garden and of the children is my greatest joy, even in these difficult times when joy is hard to find. I miss you more bitterly than I had thought possible and I think often of a moment in the yard, a second in the hall, a letter which you once wrote to me which sounded almost loving, and I wonder perhaps if we had met each other in easier times whether we might have been lovers as well as husband and wife. I wish I had felt free to go with you on this venture, I wish you had held me so dear that you would not have gone without me, or felt as I do, tied to the house and the garden and the children. But you do not, and it is not to be, and I do not waste my time in mourning the failure of a dream that perhaps I am a fool to even think of.

So I am well, a little afraid sometimes, anxious all the time, working hard to keep your father’s inheritance together for you and for Johnnie, watching Frances, and praying for you, my dear, dear husband, and hoping that wherever you are, however far away you are from me and in such a strange land, you are safe and well and will one day come home to your constant wife, Hester.

John dropped to his knees on his mattress and then hunkered down. He read it all over again. The paper was fragile in parts where it had been wetted by sea water or rain, the ink had run on one or two words but the voice of Hester, her idiosyncratic, brave little voice sounded across the sea to her husband, telling him that she was keeping faith with him.

John was completely still. In the silence of the house he could hear the scratch of a squirrel’s claws on the roof above his head. He could hear a log shift in the hearth in the room below. Hester’s love and steadiness felt like a thread that could stretch all the way from England to Virginia and could guide him home, or it might wrap around his heart and tug at it. He thought of Frances growing up so mischievous and so beautiful, and of his funny little scholarly son who prayed for him every night and thought he was wrestling with bears, and then he thought of his wife, Hester, a true wife if ever a man had one, fortifying his house with her little drawbridge, managing the business and showing people the rarities even while she watched the progress of the war and planned their escape. She deserved better than a husband whose heart was elsewhere, who exploited her skill and her courage, and then left her.

John dropped his head in his hands. He thought that he must have been mad to leave his wife and his children and his home, madly selfish to leave them in the middle of a war, mad with folly to think that he could make a life for himself in a wilderness and mad with vanity to think that he could love and marry a young woman and make his life all over again, to his own mad pattern.

John stretched out on his mattress and heard a low groan of pain, his own sick heart.

He lay very still for some time. Down below Francis the Negro came in with a load of wood and dumped it by the hearth. “You in here, Mr. Tradescant?”

“Here,” John said. He dragged himself to the ladder and came down, his knees weak, the very grip of his fingers on the rungs seemed powerless.

Francis looked more closely at John and his face slightly softened. “Was it your letter? Bad news from your home?”

John shook his head and passed his hand over his face. “No. They’re managing without me. It just made me think I should be there.”

The Negro shrugged, as if the weight of exile was unbearably heavy on his own shoulders. “Sometimes a man cannot be where he should be.”

“Yes, but I chose to come here,” John said.

A slow smile lightened the man’s face, as if John’s folly was deliciously funny. “You chose this?”

John nodded. “I have a beautiful home in Lambeth and a wife who was ready to love me, and two healthy children growing every day, and I took it into my head that there was no life for me there, and that the woman I loved was here, and that I could start all over again, that I should start all over again.”

Francis kneeled at the hearth and stacked wood with steady deftness.

“I’ve been in my father’s shadow all my life,” John said, more to himself than to the silent man. “When I came here for the first time it was virgin earth for me, because it was somewhere he had not been, with plants that he had not seen, a place where he had not made friends and where people would not always know me as his son, a lesser copy of the real thing.

“At home, I worked in his trade, I did what he did. And I always felt I did it less well. And when it came to loyalty to a master, or certainty about my own course-” John broke off with a little laugh. “He always knew what was the right thing to do. It seemed to me that he was a man of absolute certainty. And I have spent my life blown this way and that with my doubts.”

Francis gave him a brief glance. “I’ve seen Englishmen like that,” he observed. “It always makes me wonder if you are so uncertain, why you are so quick to make rules, to make war, to go into the lives of other people?”

“What about you?” John asked. “Why did you come?”

The man’s face shone in the flickering light from the fire. “I’ve been in the wrong place all my life,” he said thoughtfully. “Being in the wrong place and longing for home is no new thing for me.”

“Where is your home?” John asked.

“The kingdom of Dahomey,” the man replied.

“Is that in Africa?”

The man nodded.

“Were you sold into slavery?”

“I was pushed into slavery, I was dragged into slavery, I was kicking and screaming and biting and fighting from roadside to marketplace to gangplank and down into the hold. I didn’t stop fighting and screaming and breaking away until-” He suddenly broke off.

“Until when?”

“Until they brought us up on deck for washing and I saw the sea all around me and no land in sight, and I realized I didn’t know even where my home was anymore, that if I escaped it would do me no good because I didn’t know where to go. That I was lost, and that I would stay lost for the rest of my life.”

The two men fell silent. John measured the enormity of that journey across the sea which could suck the courage out of a man, a fighting man.

“Did they bring you to England?”

“Jamaica first, but the captain brought me on to England. He wanted a slave. Lost me in a game of cards to a London merchant, he sold me to Mr. Hobert who wanted to bring a horse to Virginia to do his plowing for him but was advised that he couldn’t ship a horse but a man would do the job as well. So now I am a plow horse.”

“He doesn’t treat you badly,” John said.

The man shook his head. “For a horse I’m doing well,” he said with quiet irony. “I get to live in the house and I eat what they eat. And I have a piece of land of my own.”

“You will grow your own food?”

“My own food, my own tobacco, and I will trade on my own account, and when I have earned fifteen shillings Mr. Hobert has agreed to sell me my liberty and then I will be his indentured servant, and not his slave, and when I have earned enough to keep myself I shall buy more land and then I shall be a planter, as good as you.”

“You will be freed?”

“Mr. Hobert has promised it, the magistrate has witnessed it, and the other black men tell me that it is not uncommon. In a country as big as this a man has to agree with his slaves how long they shall work for him. It’s too easy for them to just run from him to a master who will offer better terms. There are always other planters who would give them work, there is always more land for them to plant for themselves.”

“Don’t you want to go back to Africa?”

An expression of deep pain passed swiftly across the black face and was gone. “I have to believe that I will be there at the hour of my death,” he said. “When they talk of paradise and going to heaven that is where I think I will be. But I don’t expect to see it again in this life.”

“Did you leave a family behind?”

“My wife, my child, my mother and two little brothers.”

John was silent at the enormity of this loss. “You must hate us,” he said. “All of us white men for taking you away.”

The man looked directly at him. “I don’t hate you,” he said. “I have no time left for hate.” He paused. “But I don’t know how you can pray to your god and hope that he hears you.”

John turned his head away. “Oh, I can tell you that,” he said bitterly. “We do a clever little trick, us Englishmen. We start by assuming that everything in the world is ours, everything that ever was, everything that ever will be.” He thought of the king’s elegant assumption that the world was constructed for his pleasure, that every work of art should belong to him, almost by right. “In our own country anyone who is not powerful and beautiful is a lesser person, not worth thinking about. When we go overseas we find many men and women who are not like us, so we think they are lesser still. When we find people whose language we can’t understand we say they can’t speak, when they don’t have houses like our houses we say they can’t build, when they don’t make music like our music or dance like we dance we say they can only howl like dogs, that they are animals, that they are less than animals because less useful to us.”

“So Bertram Hobert takes me as his plow horse.”

“And I swagger around, thinking that I can come to this country and that the land is empty and I can take a headright, and the woman could have no better future than to love me,” John said bitterly. “And so I walked away from the land I already owned and the woman to whom I owed a duty. Because I am an Englishman. Because the whole world is to be made for my convenience.”

The door opened and Sarah Hobert stood in the doorway, mud encrusting her boots. “Pull them off,” she said abruptly to Francis. “I’ve come to make dinner.”

Francis kneeled at her feet. John stepped back into the darker corner of the room. Sarah came into the room in her stockinged feet and pulled off her cape, spread it out on the hooks to dry. “It’s raining again,” she said. “I wish it would stop.”

She put the cooking pot on the edge of the fire and stirred it briskly. It would be suppawn for dinner again. Francis took four bowls from the fireside and put them on the rough trestle table, and pulled up the two stools and the two logs which served as chairs. Bertram came into the room, heeling himself out of his boots, carrying a pitcher of fresh water from the river.

They bowed their heads while Bertram spoke a blessing on their food and then they ate in silence. John looked covertly at Bertram and his wife while they ate their gruel. This land had changed them both. Sarah had been a redoubtable, God-fearing woman in England, the wife of a small farmer, and a trader in her own right. This land had made her hard. Her face was pinched and determined. The fat had been rubbed off Hobert too. In England he had been round faced and ruddy cheeked but here he had faced death and terror. His face was engraved with lines of suspicion and hatred. This was a country in which only a man of remarkable courage and persistence could survive. Prosperity was harder and took even longer.

Sarah bowed her head as she finished her dinner and then she rose from the table. There was not a moment to spare for leisure. There was never a moment to spare for leisure.

“Are you ready to work?” she asked John.

He felt the letter crackle in his pocket. “I’m ready,” he said. The suppawn lay heavy in his belly, and although John knew it was old corn flour and stale water, the pain, the deep pain in the center of his body, was not indigestion but guilt. He should never have left England. He should never have sought and loved another woman. He should have stayed with the woman his father had chosen for him and brought up his children with her. He had run from his life like a schoolboy playing truant and now he realized that a man cannot have two lives. He has to choose. Attone’s rough, sarcastic counsel was right – a man pulled two ways by two threads must cut one of them.

Sarah nodded at him and went out of the house, followed by her husband and Francis. She led the way down to the end of the planting, stumping along with a spade in one hand. Bertram carried the pickax for the stubborn roots. Francis, behind them both, was pushing Sarah’s heavy wooden barrow, loaded with the precious swaying burden of small tobacco plants. John brought up the rear, carrying the two new hoes. He thought for a moment of the carving of his father on the newel post of Hatfield House. That showed a man stepping out to garden for pleasure, with his hat tilted on his head and his hoe in his hand, a rich vase under his arm spilling over with flowers and fruits. All John’s life had been filled with plants grown for beauty, filled with the idea of planting and hoeing and weeding to create a solace for the eyes, a source of joy. Now he was working for survival. Some perverse contradictory desire had driven him away from the ease and richness of his father’s life into a country where it would take all his skill and strength just to survive. His father’s inheritance, the rich joy of his father’s work, he had abandoned and left behind him. He paused and watched Hobert, Sarah and Francis as they went down the path toward the river to start planting out their tobacco crop: a small procession of determined people, planting their hopes in virgin earth.

John stayed with the Hoberts for eight nights and when he left, the field before their house was cleared of all big roots, and they had a crop of tobacco set in the ground and thriving. At his insistence they had planted a kitchen garden at the side of the house and it was set with corn, pumpkin, and beans. John would dearly have loved to grow amaracock between the rows, as the Indian women did, so that the Hoberts could have fruit in their garden as well as vegetables. But they had not tasted the fruit since the Powhatan had ceased to trade with them, and they had not thought to keep the seeds.

“I’ll see if I can get you some seeds,” John said.

Sarah gleamed at him. “Steal them,” she said.

John was genuinely shocked. “I would not have thought you would have permitted thievery.”

“It is not thieving to take from such as they,” she said firmly. “Do I steal a bone from my dog’s bowl? They have no right to the land, it has been claimed by the king. Everything in the land is ours. When they put meat in their mouths they are poaching from us. This land is a new England, and everything in it belongs to Englishmen and women.”

“You’ll come back to help me harvest, won’t you, John?” Hobert asked.

John hesitated. “If I can,” he said. “It is not easy for me to come and go.”

“Stay here then,” Sarah urged him. “If they are looking askance then you may be in danger. Don’t go back to them.”

“It is not them,” John said slowly. “It’s me. It is hard for me to come and go between this world and theirs.”

“Then stay with us,” Sarah said simply. “You have your bed in the attic, and when our crop is in we will pay you a share. We will come and rebuild your house and clear your field, as we promised. You will be our neighbor again instead of leading this mongrel life.”

John was silent for a moment.

“Don’t press him,” Hobert said gently to his wife. “Come,” he said to John. “I’ll walk up the river with you.”

He took his gun from the hook behind the door, and lit the fuse from the embers in the hearth. “I’ll bring back some meat,” he said, forestalling his wife’s protest that there was work to be done in the field. “I won’t be long.”

John bowed to Sarah and nodded his head to Francis, and the two men left.

Hobert walked beside John instead of jogging behind him. John found it strange to have a man at his shoulder, strange to have to curb his stride to a pace as slow as a child’s, strange to hear the noise they made as they moved so broad and heavy-shod through the wood. John thought that all the game for miles around would be scared away long before Hobert arrived.

“Is the hunting good now the spring is bringing the deer back into the woods?” John asked.

Hobert shook his head. “Less than last year,” he said. “It is the savages. They are taking too much and they are driving the animals deeper and deeper into the woods in the hopes that they can starve us out.”

John shook his head but did not have the energy to contradict him.

“There was news from England at Jamestown,” Hobert said. “The Scots have come over the border, they’re in the war.”

“Against the king?” John asked, astounded.

“Against the king and, more important, on the side of Parliament. There were some saying that the king would have to make terms with Parliament or the Scots. He could never fight against them both.”

“How far south are they?” John asked, thinking of the little house south of the Thames in Lambeth.

“By now? Who knows?” Hobert said carelessly. “Thank God it is not our war anymore, eh, John?”

John nodded absently. “My wife is still at Lambeth,” he said. “My son and my daughter.”

“I thought you had all but left them?” Hobert remarked.

“I should not have done so,” John said, his voice very low. “I should not have left them in the middle of such a war. I was angry with her and I insisted she come with me, and when she defied me I thought I was free to go. But a man with a child and a garden planted is never really free to go, is he, Bertram?”

Hobert shrugged. “I can’t advise,” he said. “It’s an odd life you’re making, that’s for sure.”

“It’s two lives,” John said. “One here, where I live so close to the earth that I can hear its heartbeat, and one there, where I live like an Englishman with duties and obligations but with great riches and great joys.”

“Can a man do both?” Hobert asked.

John thought for a moment. “Not with honor.”

The moment that Suckahanna saw him come from the shadow of the forest and walk past the sweat lodge, the fields and up the village street she knew that something had happened. He walked like a white man with weight in his heels. He did not stride out as the men of the Powhatan. He walked as if something was pulling his shoulders downward, pulling his head down to his feet, pulling his feet so that he looked as if he was wading through a mire of difficulties instead of dancing on smooth grass.

She went out slowly to meet him. “What’s wrong?”

He shook his head but he would not meet her eyes. “Nothing. I have done what I promised to do and now I am come home. I need not go again until harvest time.”

“Are they sick?” she asked, thinking that his slouch might be shielding some illness or pain.

“They are well,” he said.

“And you?”

He straightened up. “I am weary,” he said. “I shall go to the sweat lodge and then wash in the river.” He gave her a brief unhappy smile. “And then everything will be as it was.”

In the warm days when the woods seemed to grow and turn green before his very eyes, John returned to his trade of plant collecting and rarity hunting. Already he had sent home a large parcel of Indian goods: clothing, tools, a case of bands and caps made from bark; now he recruited Suckahanna’s son as his porter and every day the two of them left the village for a long stroll in the woods and came back laden with sprouting roots. John worked in companionable silence with the boy, and found that his thoughts often wandered to Lambeth. He felt great affection for Hester and a powerful sense that he should be there with her, to face whatever dangers might come from a country in the grip of an insane war. But at the same time he knew he could not leave Suckahanna and the Powhatan. He knew that his happiness, and his life, lay with the People.

John thought himself a fool: to abandon a wife and then to try to support her, to take a wife and then to think daily of her rival. He wanted so much to be a man like Attone, or even a man like Hobert, who saw life in simple terms, who saw one road and steadily walked it. John did not think of himself as complex and challenged; he lacked all such vanity. He saw himself as indecisive and weak and he blamed himself.

Suckahanna watched him create a nursery bed, heel in the roots, and linger over his cuttings; but she said nothing for many weeks. Then she spoke.

“What are they for?”

“I shall send them to England,” John said. “They can be grown and sold there to gardeners.”

“By your wife?”

He tried to meet her direct black gaze as frankly and openly as he could. “My English wife,” he corrected her.

“And what will she think? When a dead man sends her plants?”

“She will think that I am doing my duty by her,” John said. “I cannot abandon her.”

“She will know that you are alive, and that you have abandoned her,” Suckahanna observed. “Whereas now she may have given you up for dead.”

“I have to support her in the way that I can.”

She nodded and did not reply. John could not accept the stoical dignity of the Powhatan silence. “I feel that I owe her anything that I can do,” he said awkwardly. “She sent me a letter which I got at Hobert’s house. She is in difficulties and alone. I left her to bring up my children and to manage my house and garden in England, and there is a war in my country…”

Suckahanna looked at him but said nothing.

“I am torn,” John said with a sudden burst of honesty.

“You chose your path,” she reminded him. “Freely chose it.”

“I know,” he said humbly. “But I keep thinking…”

He broke off and looked at her. She had turned her head away from him, hiding her face with a sweep of black hair. Her shoulders, showing brown and smooth through the veil of black hair, were shaking. He gave an exclamation and stepped forward to comfort her, thinking that she was weeping. But then he saw the gleam of her white teeth against her brown skin, and she flicked around and was running down the village lane, away from him, and was gone. She had been laughing. Not even her immense courtesy could restrain her amusement any longer. The spectacle of her husband struggling interminably forward-backward, duty-desire, English-Powhatan, was in the end too helplessly funny for her to take seriously. He heard the wild ripple of her laugh as she ran down the path to the garden where the sweet corn was already growing high.

“Aye, you can laugh,” John said to himself, feeling himself wholly English, as leaden footed as if he were wearing boots and breeches and weighed down by a hat. “And God knows I love you for it. And God knows I wish I could laugh at myself too.”

When the snows were melted from even the highest hills, when there were no sharp frosts in the morning, when the ground was dry beneath the light summer moccasins of the braves, there was a meeting called by the ancient lord, Opechancanough. John the Eagle went with Attone and with one of the senior advisors of the community to represent their village, traveling along the narrow trails, northward up the river to the great capital town of Powhatan. It nestled in the dry woodlands, at the foot of the mountains on the edge of the river which John had once known as the James River, but which he now called the Powhatan, and the waterfall at the side of Powhatan town was Paqwachowing.

They sighted the town of about forty braves at dusk, and paused outside the city boundaries.

“You’re to keep quiet until spoken to,” Attone said briefly to John. “The elder will do the talking.”

John looked without resentment at the older man who had led the way at a hard pace for the journey of many days. “I didn’t even want to come,” he protested. “I’m hardly likely to interrupt.”

“Didn’t want to come, when you can see new plants and trees and flowers? And take them back to Suckahanna when we sail downriver by canoe?” Attone mocked.

“All right,” John allowed. “But I’m saying I didn’t ask to come. I didn’t want a place here.”

The older man’s sharp beaky face turned to him. “But your place is here,” he said.

“I know it, older one,” he said respectfully.

“You will answer questions but not give opinions,” the man ruled.

John nodded obediently and fell into file at the rear.

No one knew the age of the great warlord Opechancanough. He had inherited his power from his brother the great Powhatan, father of Princess Pocahontas, the Indian heroine whom John had visited when he had been only a little boy and she had been a celebrity visiting London. There was no trace of her beauty in the ravaged face of her uncle. He sat on a great bench at the end of his luxurious long house, his cape of office shining in the gloom with the round discs of abalone shells. He barely glanced at John and his companions as they shuffled up, bowed, deposited their tribute on the growing pile before him, and stepped back.

When everyone had come and bowed to the lord he made a brief gesture with his hand and the priest stepped forward, cast some dust into the fire and watched the scented smoke spiralling upward. John, weary from many days’ walking, watched the smoke too and thought that it made strange and tempting shapes, almost as if one could read the future from it, just as he sometimes lay on his back beside Suckahanna’s son when they detected shapes and images in the clouds that sailed overhead.

There was a deep mutter from the massed men packed tight into the big house. The priest walked around the fire, people leaning away from the sweep of his cape as he circled, staring into the embers. Finally he stepped back and bowed to Opechancanough.

“Yes,” he said.

Suddenly the old man sharpened into life. He leaned forward. “You are sure? We will conquer?”

The priest nodded simply. “We will.”

“And they will be pushed back into the sea where they came from, and the waves will foam red with their blood and their women and children will hoe our fields and serve us where we have served them?”

The priest nodded. “I have seen it,” he said.

Opechancanough looked past the priest at the men, waiting in silence, drinking in the assurance that they were unbeatable. “You have heard,” he said. “We will win. Now tell me how this victory is to be won.”

John had been dizzy with the scent of the smoke and the sudden warmth and darkness of the hut but suddenly he snapped awake, wide awake, as if someone had slapped his face. He strained his ears and his comprehension to grasp the quick exchange of advice, argument and information: the news of an isolated farmhouse here, a newly built fort with cannon further down the river. He realized with a sinking heart what he had known all along but had continually pushed to the back of his mind: that Opechancanough and the army of the Powhatan were going to fall upon the people of Jamestown, and upon every white settler everywhere in this country which they had called empty and then proceeded to fill. That if the Powhatan won there would not be a white man, woman or child left alive or out of slavery in Virginia. And if the Powhatan lost there would be a dreadful reckoning to pay.

“And what does our brother, the Eagle, say?” Opechancanough suddenly asked. His beaked harsh face turned toward John, where he sat at the back. The men before him melted away as if Opechancanough’s gaze was a spear thrust pointed at his heart.

“Nothing…” John stammered, the Powhatan language sticking on his tongue. “Nothing… sir.”

“Will they be ready for us? Do they know we have been waiting and planning?”

Miserably John shook his head.

“Did they think us defeated and driven back, forced out of our forests and away from our game trails?”

“I think so,” John said. “But I have not been with the white men for a long time.”

“You will advise us,” Opechancanough ruled. “You will tell us how to avoid the guns and at what time of day we should attack. We will use your knowledge of them to come against them. You agree?”

John opened his mouth but no sound came. He was aware of Attone rising to his feet at his side.

“He is struck dumb by the honor,” Attone said smoothly. Out of sight he trod hard on John’s toes.

“Indeed I am,” John said numbly.

“Your hands will be red with English blood,” Opechancanough promised him. His face was serious enough but there was a spark of mischief, that irresistible Powhatan mischief, at the back of his eyes. “That will make you happy, Eagle.”